Cannabis, “Coolies,” and Colonialism in the British Caribbean, 1838–1913

Conflict surrounding immigrant communities in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century centered on a wide range of issues, from economic competition to subversive ideologies to perceptions of racial or religious difference. One issue that has received less attention from historians, although it remains a prominent concern today, was the international spread of illicit drugs. The migration of ganja (marijuana) from South Asia to the British Caribbean via indentured workers offers a rich case for exploring how a drug transplanted from the Old World to the New became identified as a concern, pathologized by reformers, and criminalized by lawmakers. Drawing on newspaper editorials, missionary journals, medical literature, and colonial archives, this paper argues that the meanings and uses of ganja in the British Caribbean (mainly Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana) were as much a product of discursive flows and material asymmetries in post-emancipation plantation colonies as they were a product of traditional East Indian consumption practices and the drug’s complex psychoactive effects. In addition to maintaining older social and spiritual uses of ganja, East Indians adapted its use to life on Caribbean estates in surprising ways, using it as a labor stimulant in the cane fields and as a source of potvaliance (i.e., “Dutch courage”) for violently asserting patriarchal authority amid a skewed sex ratio that was itself a product of the indentured labor scheme. Elite observers in the region—including missionaries and reformers from distant reaches of the British Empire—interpreted local incidents involving ganja through prevailing orientalist discourse and popular understandings of the drug acquired through imperial networks, thus linking contemporary understandings of the drug’s psychoactive effects to the alleged pathologies of Hindu and Muslim “coolies.” In doing so, they founded a legacy of cultural imperialism and criminalization in the Anglo-Caribbean, which is only now being challenged by lawmakers.